topic Re: Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater in ONTAP Discussions

Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater

csteiner52 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:44:51 GMT

Current state.

12 x 960G drives (slots 0-5 and 18-23).

Partitioned with ADP (production data on two small aggregates).

Customer has found 12 x 7.6T SSDs without a shelf. They would like to add these to the existing half-populated shelf with the 960s, partition the new disks, create a new aggregate on each node with the larger disks, then move the data volumes to the new SSDs.

This will require a manual partitioning of the 7.6T drives, as there isn't a current template to use for this size on the system (only 960G disks).

Does anyone know if there is still a secret way to manually partition drives without having a source partition. I know that prior to ONTAP 9.6 you could do this. Even the KB article is showing this.

System is on 9.11.1, so I am not sure this is available any longer.

How to partition a drive manually in ONTAP 9 - NetApp Knowledge Base

Re: Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater

TMACMD — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:19:13 GMT

Not sure who all is able to access this kb, you may want to ask your support person to refer to:

https://kb.netapp.com/onprem%2Fontap%2Fhardware%2FHow_to_partition_a_drive_manually_in_ONTAP_9

Even though you are running ONTAP later than 9.5, I used those instructions (the ones labeled ONTAP 9.5 and earlier) on 9.10.1P12 and it worked.

Honestly, it’s not something I would want most customers to do without a little handholding.

Re: Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater

csteiner52 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:40:40 GMT

Thank you. That appears to be the same kb I had linked.

I am going to try the system node shell partition commands once the customer installs the disks into the shelf.

Re: Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater

TMACMD — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:37:34 GMT

Did you even read my post?

i sent a link and said “Even though you are running ONTAP later than 9.5, I used those instructions (the ones labeled ONTAP 9.5 and earlier) on 9.10.1P12 and it worked.”

Please refer to the kb one already posted and look at the section I’ve already mentioned

Re: Manual partitioning of drives ONTAP 9.6 or greater

csteiner52 — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 19:29:05 GMT

Yup...that was my fault for not reading the entire KB and missing the step where node shell is used to do the creation steps. I was too focused on the 9.6+ steps where it didn't have that. If it works on 9.10.1 then it should be good. Thank you for replying so quickly.